5 Marketing Automation Best Practices for Better ROI in 2019

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Vandita is a passionate writer and IT enthusiast. She is a Computer Lecturer by profession at the University of Delhi. She has previously worked as a Software Engineer with Aricent Technologies. Vandita writes for MarTech Advisor as a freelance contributor.

Marketing automation helps marketers automate, streamline, and scale marketing activities. But most marketers are concerned about the effectiveness of their marketing automation efforts and solutions and need to know whether they are worth the investment. Here we discuss five marketing automation best practices that you can use in 2019, to grow your business and maximize your ROI.

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Marketing automation is used to mechanize monotonous and laborious marketing activities, while allowing marketers to focus on the tasks that help them scale their business. Apart from performing repetitive activities, you can leverage marketing automation to optimize your return on investment (ROI) as well.

Let’s find out more about the marketing automation best practices which will help you maximize your business ROI.

1.Lead Management Automation

If you can automate your lead management system, half your battle is won. No two leads are the same; they may have different personas, buying potential, or they might be in different stages of the sales funnel. Different leads need to be served different content to be nurtured, engaged, or converted, and that’s where lead management automation comes in.

Lead processes that you can automate include:

Mapping the buyer’s journey: Your marketing automation process can deliver great results if you can identify how a prospect passes through the various stages of the funnel and the current stage of her journey. Leads could be anonymous, known, engaged, marketing qualified lead, sales accepted lead, won, lost, closed, etc. Depending on the type of the lead, you can identify the right content for them, the right mechanism to nurture them, and bottlenecks in the funnel. The nurturing process becomes efficient, and the lead qualification-to-conversion flow becomes smooth.

Lead scoring: You can automate the process of capturing lead information and scoring them based on their potential to convert. The lead score will help you determine how much time or resources you need to invest in a lead. It will help you decide whether the lead is ready to be passed on to sales for further perusal. Automating lead scoring will help the sales team scale their efforts for the prospects who are at the bottom of the funnel. Investing in hot leads and proportionately allocating budgets to cold, lost, or recycled leads can help you optimize your ROI.

Lead qualification: Before sending the lead to the sales team, it should qualify for specific criteria so that they get only the hot leads – the ones in the decision stage. This saves sales resources as well as time, in case the lead is sent back to marketing. You can automate the process of passing the marketing-qualified lead to sales automatically by applying a threshold on the lead score value.

Lead progression: Event-based triggers can be set up to update the various stages of the prospect, and rules can be set up to label the leads, create sales tasks, pull out the leads from nurture campaigns, and send welcome emails or automated offer messages, etc.

2.Automate Loyalty Programs

Your automated lead scoring process can help you identify your most engaged prospects and most loyal customers. Automating your marketing workflow to invite your loyal customers to loyalty programs with special offers and deals can go a long way in building a lasting relationship. It also encourages them to keep coming back to you.

3.Automate List Segmentation

Segmentation using automation workflows will save you an enormous amount of time. If you can leverage the data available in your CDP systems, you can identify customer buying behavior, customer preferences, their pain points, etc. which can help you create highly relevant segments, and send targeted messages. This saves you the extra effort of sending the messages to the leads who do not share similar attributes.

Christopher Hansen, Chief Product Officer, IgnitionOne, predicts that in 2019, as the volume of customer data continues to grow, we will continue to see an increase in the use of AI and machine learning toward developing deeper levels of customer intelligence, which will be vital in making customer data actionable. “Through the use of AI, ML and Customer Intelligence, marketers will have access to unprecedented levels of customer behavior insights, resulting in a more nuanced, comprehensive understanding of each customer’s purchase journey and relationship with brands,” says Hansen.

4.Email Marketing Automation

Email automation is an effective strategy to attract prospects, engage and nurture them, and retain existing customers. It allows you to maximize your customer outreach, set-up triggered emails to send to a targeted set of customers and saves you time and money in the long run.

5.Measure

The best way to understand how high your ROI is, is by measuring it. Most marketing solutions can help you track how much you spent (personnel time, content, money, offers, etc.) on each prospect, how long it took for her to convert and what business she gave you.

Measuring all aspects of the buyer’s journey will give you insights into which processes are working and which are not, and help you make informed data-driven decisions on devising a strategy for improving results.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is essential to add value to your marketing and sales processes and even to your customers, provided you do the groundwork for setting up the right rules and triggers for the automation process. Following these marketing automation best practices will help you create better opportunities and in turn, increase your ROI.

Have you been using marketing automation? What are some best practices you follow? Let us know in the comments below.